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Bella Ramsey says that Joel absolutely made the right call in the season one finale of HBO’s The Last of Us TV series.
Just as a heads-up, I always try to avoid spoilers as much as I can. However, with a story of this nature, it’s practically impossible without going into the necessary details.
So with that in mind, if you’re yet to watch the season one finale of The Last of Us HBO TV series or the first video game from Naughty Dog, I will be going into major spoilers. You have been warned.
At its core, the story of The Last of Us, is about grief, disconnecting from the world, but ultimately discovering a reason to exist, something to fight and live for.
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The Last of Us opened up with a banger of a prologue resulting in mouths hitting the floor when Joel’s daughter, Sarah was brutally murdered by the military in a poor attempt to contain the cordyceps outbreak.
Twenty years then passed since Joel’s tragic loss, and not only is the world a very different place, but so too is Joel. A once heart-warming family man turned brutal cold-blooded killer that will do anything just to get by. Then Ellie enters his life.
Ellie is said to be the key to the cordyceps virus and a rebel group known as the Fireflies tasks Joel with delivering her safely from Boston to St Mary’s Hospital in Utah. It was a treacherous journey in which the duo suffered great loss and pain.
At first, Joel and Ellie had a testing relationship, but the longer they spent together, not only did Ellie eventually consider Joel to be a father figure, but Joel also found Ellie to be the daughter he had once lost.
By the time we come to the conclusion of The Last of Us, for both the video game and season one of the HBO series, Joel is forced to make a seemingly impossible choice. Ellie being the “cure” is more complicated than first thought. In order for her to be that cure, she must die.
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Joel must either allow the Fireflies to do their work, and extract the cure in the hope of saving humanity at the expense of Ellie’s life or Joel thinks f*** it, no one is taking Ellie away from this world, a girl he now considers to be the daughter he had lost.
In The Last of Us: Part I, a PC and PS5 remake of the 2013 game, as well as in the 2019 sequel, and the HBO series, it arguably led us to believe that Joel made a selfish choice to save Ellie at the cost of humanity.
However, in the original PS3 game, documents and audio logs were found in the hospital stating that there were similar girls to Ellie and that all operations/experiments had failed. In other words, people died for nothing.
With this information at hand, I had no doubts that Joel made the correct choice in The Last of Us. Yet, I swear, a lot of those documents/audio logs were not only removed from the PS4 remaster in 2014 but also from the PC and PS5 remake in 2022. Without this information, Joel’s decision looked to be more selfish as too was it in the HBO series.
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I must also add that the Fireflies were going to proceed with the surgery without consent of Ellie. She knew that she was a cure, but was under anaesthesia when Joel was informed of the cost of that cure.
It always made me wonder what Ellie would have said if she knew that she was going to die. That was a choice the Fireflies never gave Ellie, regardless of the choice she may or may not have made. That’s a dick move in my opinion.
Most of The Last of Us audience agreed with the decision made by Joel, what’s more, the HBO series showrunner even labelled the lovable father as a “hero”. Still, there is an element of doubt.
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Thankfully, as reported by Huffington Post (via Vanity Fair), Ramsey said that Joel made the right call. When responding to fan theories, Ramsey said that: “he made the right decision. And I think most people agree.”
“I don’t think it was even a choice,” Ramsey continued. “I don’t think it was even a decision for him. There was no other option other than to save her. Because … he did save the world. But, like, his world. That’s so cringy but kind of true.”
So there you have it, if Bella Ramsey says that Joel made the right call, who are we to argue?
At this time, we do not have a release date for season two of HBO’s The Last of Us, but at least know that production for the second season is underway. Furthermore, The Last of Us could run for at least three seasons. Happy days!
Topics: The Last Of Us, The Last Of Us Part 2, Naughty Dog